I know no better way to celebrate Valentine's Day than to share how I met my Valentine almost twenty-five years ago and how we snuck up on commitment. (This true story also appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Married Life!: 101 Inspirational Stories about Fun, Family, and Wedded Bliss ) Happy Valentine's Day my lovely Ann. “Your task is not to seek for love, but to find the barriers in yourself that you have built against [...]
I don't always use professional proofreaders...so shoot me. I'd say I work on a shoe string budget but I sold my shoestrings like week for more writing supplies. That being said, I have found that with a little guidance there are plenty of people who can fill in quite nicely and pick up most of those nasty typos, etc. So, once again I've taken the time to write out those instructions and offer them to you [...]
If you've been following this blog for any length of time it's probably not a surprise to learn that I'm a BIG, as in HUGE, fan of Scrivener writing software. As with any new software program there's a bit of a learning curve though the folks at Literature and Latte who designed Scrivener has kept that curve quite shallow with some very simple to follow instructional videos and a 30-day trial period...plenty of time to get [...]
I had a most successful NaNoWriMo this year. Not only did I surpass the 50,000 word count goal completing most of a rough draft of my book, Babble, but perhaps even more valuable were the many lessons learned from my participation including: How to track character's POVs using Scrivener's color coding feature. (More detailed post forthcoming.) Combining Outlining with Discovery Writing (More detailed post forthcoming.) Use the Support Features on NaNoWriMo to stay inspired. Write Early [...]
The internet is a cornucopia of useful and valuable resources for writers with many of them being free. One of my favorites is the Writing Excuses Podcast (Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.) Truth is, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Howard Taylor, Mary Robinette Kowal and their many guests are quite smart when it comes to writing. They also know that other writers typically have ADD so fifteen minutes is [...]
I read a post this morning by my good friend and fellow writer, Joseph D'Agnese as he shared about the books of a children’s book author named Clifford B. Hicks. As Joe wrote: "He [Clifford B. Hicks] wrote a series of books about a kid named Alvin Fernald, who was sort of the MacGyver of the kid world. With a toothpick, a piece of string and leftover jelly sandwich, Alvin could build a contraption to save [...]
I find the concept of serendipity to be fascinating though often not well understood. According to Richard Eyre in his stellar book, Spiritual Serendipity: Cultivating and Celebrating the Art of the Unexpected, serendipity is "that quality of mind which, through awareness, sagacity, and good fortune, allows one to frequently discover something good while seeking something else." You could even say that serendipity is the counter-balance to discipline that I wrote about here. As writers, being in [...]
I recently started reading Jonathan Gunson's free PDF book, The Bestsellers Lab Guide for Authors. (It's free -- you 'pay' with just you name and email address so why not zip over and pick up your own copy? Then we can discuss other points here as well.) I'm finding it both affirming (that I'm doing a lot of the things he recommends) and gap creating (there's more ground to take in developing my author career and [...]
We were originally called the Project Purpose Writing Team but then, when we outgrew that name, we became the Visionary Writers On Purpose Team. We met weekly on the phone via teleconferencing and we'd share our writing projects, our successes, our failures, and our breakthroughs. We varied in number from a half dozen to a dozen or more scattered all over the country (including Canada). And we wrote. We wrote magazine articles. We wrote poetry. Several [...]
Several years ago I decided while living in Massachusetts I decided to take some art classes. While my original plan was to take oil painting classes, after meeting with one of the art instructors and viewing samples of his pastel paintings, I knew it was time to learn a whole new medium. I remember watching my instructor painting a still life prior to my first class. I began to think I'd made a mistake. Maybe the [...]
